Emergency Notification System

Background

Campus safety—and the ability to provide effective notification in an emergency—is a critical issue. Brooklyn College administrators understand this and are constantly seeking a balance between facilitating an environment that fosters academic and personal freedoms and providing operational continuity, emergency preparedness, and life safety protection for students, staff, faculty, and visitors. As such, the college has implemented a voice paging notification system that delivers optimal protection by offering a reliable method to provide timely and accurate information to our campus community.

CUNY A!ert versus Brooklyn College PA System

CUNY A!ert provides a secure, Web-based emergency alert system that sends messages (to those who have signed up) via cell phone (text and/or voice), land-line telephone, and e-mail. The Brooklyn College voice paging system augments the college’s mass notification plan by offering real-time voice announcement capabilities throughout the physical campus buildings. This arrangement affords the college with a comprehensive mass notification program capable of making real-time voice announcements to keep the campus community informed of emergencies and how to respond.

Highlights

The benefits of the public address system are numerous:

• Voice announcements provide clear, real-time instructions to campus community members for situations that may be rapidly evolving.
• All areas (interior and exterior) on campus can be covered by audio announcements.
• Announcements can be directed to specific buildings or “zones” on campus, allowing control over dissemination of information.
• Voice announcements can reach areas where cell phones and networks may not.
• The voice paging system is exceptionally flexible—initiated from many different locations from both on and off campus, and accessible by various college administrators.
• The hard-wired system has numerous redundancy features and backup systems, resulting in a reliable real-time public address system.
• Students, staff, and faculty do not need to be online to receive important announcements.

System Deployment

The on-campus PA notification system project integrated the public address system into 10 campus buildings: Boylan Hall, the Brooklyn College Library, Ingersoll Hall, Ingersoll Hall Extension, James Hall, the Student Center, the West End Building, Whitehead Hall, Whitman Hall, and the Chiller Plant. The West Quad Center and the Leonard & Claire Tow Center for the Performing Arts employ speaker strobes from fire control panels to make announcements.

Conclusion

When an emergency happens or is imminent, campus officials must be able to quickly and efficiently alert people in the immediate environment. This public address system can quickly notify the campus community of threats and advise them of appropriate actions to take to provide for the safest possible outcomes.